Feedback for Nov. 15, 2018

Obscene reality

Re: “A memorial for Mildred Harnack” (11/8/2018): It’s good to know that the memorial to Arvid and Mildred Fish Harnack has been set up in Marshall Park. We’re all looking forward to the completion of the project. In the meantime, I have to express my anger at the tone of Jay Rath’s article in this week’s Isthmus. The Harnacks were graduates of the University of Wisconsin who were brutally executed during the resistance to Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime. They gave their lives to further the end of the war in Europe in the 1940s. However, your comments about the autopsy on Mildred’s decapitated body border on the obscene. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” who performed unspeakable experiments on both living and dead inmates at Auschwitz, would be pleased. I’m not!

Red seawall?

Re: “Red seawall mostly holds in Wisconsin” (11/7/2018): How can you write an article like this and not point out the conflict that Democrats received more votes than Republicans overall and yet, NOTHING changed in the Assembly. It was not a “red seawall” — it was gerrymandered districts that earned most Republicans their victories. Call a spade a spade.

— Scott Voss, via isthmus.com

Technology hype

Re: “UW’s innovation leader” (11/8/2018): I would not choose to sound like a broken record, but Isthmus has been carrying a tsunami of technological hype by Marc Eisen that is so indiscriminately lopsided, it winds up doing a grave disservice to medicine’s higher calling.

I have already pointed out that [Eisen’s] insistence the university prostrate itself for every bio-entrepreneur’s peremptory demand risked corrupting science. This week his high-tech diatribe raises the age-old question of whether medicine is more than a technology-delivery system.

To be clear, I would never suggest forgoing technological gains. A close friend was recently diagnosed with cancer and a chemo cocktail is the only thing now keeping him alive.

But, it is the grossest of fallacies to claim that a healthy life is solely a function of throwing medical apparatuses against the wall like spaghetti, as the terrible imbalance in Eisen’s series suggests as the path to nirvana.

This distortion of what life is all about ignores the preeminent role of other critical non-technological factors needed to keep sickness at bay.

The critical role of stress in the modern world on our heart, of omnipresent chemicals and pollutants on causing cancer, and of processed foods on disrupting our microbiome, are all blissfully irrelevant to the Brave New World that Eisen draws for us.